laubach at biogfx.neuro.wfu.edu (Mark Laubach) writes:
> Could it be that info trans is limited by the poissonian nature
> of the generators underlying spike activity?
>
> (I doubt that I am the first to say of such a thing. Does anyone
> know of refs for previous statements like mine above from the
> neurophysiological or computational literature?)
This is a question that has interested many people for a long time
now, and provoked a lot of argument. In fact, the recently published
work by Zach Mainen and Terry Sejnowski (in Science, I think; I don't
have the exact reference) was an attempt to measure this underlying
variability experimentally, for cortical pyramidal cells. Their
references will provide a few pointers to the existing literature.
-- Bill